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YR address at MSU, October 30, 2006


U.S. - RUSSIAN SCHOLARLY EXCHANGES

by Yale Richmond


It is indeed a pleasure for me to return to Moscow and find that the
agreement between Moscow State University (MSU) and the State University of
New York (SUNY), in which I played a role thirty years ago, still exists
and is flourishing. It is also a great pleasure to meet once more with
former MSU Prorector Tropin and find that he is still full of energy and
enthusiasm.
I served for thirty years as a Foreign Service Officer, half of them
working on exchanges with Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe, but I
have been retired since 1980, and I no longer speak for the U.S.
government. Comments you will hear today are entirely my own.
There have been many changes in Moscow since my last visit here
fifteen years ago. The city is much more lively than the Moscow I once
knew, and not much different from other European capitals. There is new
construction everywhere in the city. More Russians are speaking English.
Many have traveled abroad, seen other countries, and studied there. The
women are more fashionable. And I received my Russian visa within a week
rather than the day before my departure.
A year ago when I participated in the selection of Russian boys and
girls for a secondary school exchange with the United States, I learned
that many of them, although only age fifteen or sixteen, had traveled
abroad, have access to the internet, and know much more about world beyond
Russia's borders than their parents did at that age.
And the Iron Curtain is no more. I recall my visit to Saratov in 1992
and meeting English teachers from the university and higher schools there
who told me that they had been teaching English for all of their adult
lives but I was the first native speaker of English they had ever seen in
Saratov. And all they wanted was to hear me speak English, and with my
Boston accent.
I open my remarks on U.S.-Russian exchanges with a quote from George
F. Kennan, a former American ambassador to Moscow, a great historian, and
one of our leading experts on Russia, who died last year at the age of 101.
But here is what our great Kennan said in 1999:

"...when it comes to the relationship between great peoples, that
relationship is not finished, not complete when it only consists of
the military relationship, the economic, and the political. There has
to be, and particularly in the case of Russia, there has to be another
supplementary dimension to these relations -- and that is the
dimension of the meeting of people -- in the work of the intellect, in
the respect for scholarship and history, in the understanding of art
and music and in all the intuitive feelings that go to unite us even
in the most difficult times to many people in Russia."


U.S. - Soviet Exchanges

There was indeed a meeting of Russians and Americans between 1958 and 1988
when some 50,000 came to the United States on various exchanges under the
Cultural Agreement between our two governments (And that number is a very
conservative estimate).Moreover, thousands of other Russians went on
exchanges to West European countries - the United Kingdom, Germany, France,
and Italy, among others.
They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers
and journalists, government and party officials, as well as musicians,
dancers, and athletes, and more than a few KGB officers.
Travel broadens, it is said, and anyone who has traveled to another
country, or worked or studied there, knows how he or she has been
influenced by that travel. From my own personal experience, having lived
and worked in five foreign countries and visited many more, I can say that
you don't really understand your own country until you have traveled abroad
and seen other countries.
And here I would add that through exchanges we also improve
ourselves. As athletes need international competition to improve their
performance, so do musicians and artists, and scientists and scholars who
benefit from learning how science and scholarship are done in other
countries.
I am not implying that the American way is best for Russia, but we
all benefit from seeing how things are done in other countries.
Many reasons are given for the end of Cold War, but in a book I wrote
three years ago, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron
Curtain, I provide another reason.[1] That the end of the Cold War was a
consequence of contacts and exchanges between Russia and the West, and with
the United States in particular, over the thirty-five years that followed
the death of Stalin in 1953.
Moreover, those exchanges of people were conducted openly, under
agreements signed by our two governments, and at a cost that was negligible
in comparison with American and Russian expenditures for defense and
intelligence over those same years.


U.S. Objectives

Here I quote From a 1956 National Security Council Statement of Policy on
East-West Exchanges (NSC 5607), now declassified and available to scholars:
U.S. objectives in exchanges with the Soviet Union were to:
1. broaden relations by expanding contacts between the people and
institutions of the two countries;
2. involve the Soviets in joint activities and develop habits of
cooperation;
3. end Soviet isolation and inward orientation by giving it a broader
view of the world and itself;
4. improve U.S. understanding of Russia through access to its
institutions and people;
5. obtain the benefits of cooperation in culture, higher education,
science and technology.
Those objectives are still valid and applicable to our exchanges with
Russia today.


Graduate Students and Young Faculty

The Graduate Student and Young Faculty Exchange was considered one of the
more important of those exchanges. In 1958, in preparing for negotiations
for the U.S -Soviet Cultural Agreement, President Eisenhower wanted to
invite 10,000 students to the United States, with the U.S. paying all
costs, and with no reciprocity required. The Director of our Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI), J.Edgar Hoover, surprisingly approved.
But the State Department, in negotiations with the Soviet Union at
the time, was seeking agreement for 100 students, and for the first
Cultural Agreement in 1958 only twenty students were agreed to. And in the
first year, because of numerical reciprocity, after Moscow withdrew three
of its nominations, only seventeen were exchanged.



The American students were in their mid-twenties, selected in open
competition, and mostly in Russian studies - language, literature, and
history.
The Russian students were about ten years older, in their mid-
thirties, had the Candidate degree, were mostly in science and
technology, and came on a komandirovka (official visit).
Nevertheless, despite the differences, over the next thirty years
several thousand Soviet graduate students and young scholars came to the
United States for study under the Cultural Agreement, and an equal number
of Americans went to the Soviet Union. Moreover, those exchanges continued
over many years, despite the ups and downs in Soviet relations with the
United States.
In fact, when relations were not good, and the State Department was
considering what steps to take, academic exchanges under the Cultural
Agreement were always a very high priority for us. They represented the
future and they were the last of our programs with the Soviet Union we were
prepared to end.


What did those Exchanges Accomplish?

For the United States the exchanges created a body of American scholars
knowledgeable about Russia who, having lived there, were able to
distinguish fact from fiction. And we needed that, because American
knowledge about Russia was as limited as was Russian knowledge about
America.
Those exchanges enriched our universities. Almost all of our
professors in Russian studies today are alumni of those exchanges, and I
have to assume the same benefits for Russia. But here I want to mention
only two Russians who came to the United States in the early years of the
exchanges.
Aleksandr Nikolaevich Yakovlev was one of four Russian graduate
students enrolled at Columbia University in 1958 in the first year of
student exchange under the Cultural Agreement signed earlier that year by
the two governments. At Columbia, Yakovlev studied modern American history
and politics, in particular the foreign policy of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt. But in an interview I had with Yakovlev a few years ago, I asked
what he got from that year at Columbia. Yakovlev told me he spent most of
his time in the library where he read more than 200 books that he could not
read in Russia.
Yakovlev returned to Moscow, still a convinced communist, and several books
he wrote in the following years, in keeping with the tenor of the times,
were stridently anti-American. Yet, he was deeply influenced by his year in
the United States which he has described as more meaningful to him than the
ten years he later spent as Soviet ambassador to Canada.
The other Russian I want to mention, Nikolai Vasilevich Sivachev, was
known to many of you. As an MSU lecturer in American history, Sivachev
studied American history and politics at Columbia University 1961-62. But
he later confided to American friends that he had been sent to learn why
the United States, in the 1930s under Roosevelt, had a New Deal rather than
a communist revolution.
Twelve years later, in 1973, as an MSU docent, Sivachev helped to establish
the Fulbright Lecturer Exchange with his Five-Year Plan. Because the MSU
course for history was for five years, Sivachev wanted a U.S. visiting
lecturer in each year of the five-year program in American History. In
that, he had the support of MSU Rector Rem Khokhlov who had studied physics
at Stanford University in the second year of the Cultural Agreement.
Unfortunately Khokhlov and Sivachev are no longer with us, taken from
us at a far too young age, but what they accomplished in scholarly
exchanges, is a fitting memorial to them.
Building on the exchange of lecturers, there was an agreement in 1976
between MSU and SUNY, signed by Rem Khokhlov, for direct exchanges between
the two universities, the first continuing exchange between a Russian and
American University. It began with an exchange of professors, and then an
exchange of undergraduates. And today it has expanded to many exchanges
with other Russian universities and higher schools.
Also credited to Sivachev is the establishment at MSU of an institute
for the study of the United States and Canada. In exchange, a program of
Russian studies was established at SUNY by Chancellor John Ryan.
Thanks to those and many other exchanges, the two countries came to
know considerably more about each other. In universities, scholarly and
scientific institutions, business, and government there are people who have
studied in the other country or have at least visited it.
They have the experience that comes only with having spent some time in
another country, mastered its language, and become familiar with its
culture. They are able to distinguish fact from fiction, to understand what
is really going on, and what people mean no matter what they may say. Their
expertise has provided assurance that the two governments would not
misjudge each other's actions and intentions, as they had so often in the
past.
Exchanges also provided a framework for increased cooperation.
The initial contacts between the two countries established during the early
years of so-called "exchange tourism" provided the basis for later
agreements in the 1970s, during the detente years, on cooperation in
science and technology where Russians and Americans would work together on
problems of common interest. The best known of those was the agreement for
cooperation in space.
Through such exchanges, each country also learned that it could
accept large numbers of foreign visitors without threat to its national
security. Indeed, it can be argued that under the arms control agreements
there would have been no intrusive military inspections were it not for
experience gained in cultural and scientific exchanges.
Cultural Exchange prepared the way for the end of Cold War, and
helped to prevent it from becoming a Hot War. And it cost the United States
and Russia almost nothing compared with their expenditures for defense and
intelligence over same period of time.


The Present and the Future

But all that is in the past. What about the present and the future?
U.S. government funding is always difficult to predict because it depends
on our Congress. Our President proposes a budget, but the Congress decides.
And today we are understandably refocusing our attention on the Middle East
which was neglected in past years.
But more than a half million foreign students (actually 565,000 in
2004/2005) are enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities every year. The
most come from India (more than 80,000), followed by China (more than
60,000), Korea, and Japan. And although the number of foreign students
applying to U.S. colleges has declined slightly, the United States still
hosts more international students than any other country.
However, more than 70 percent of the funding for our foreign
students comes from sources outside the United States -- from families,
other private sources, or foreign governments. Is non-governmental funding
also the answer for Russia?
In the past, the U.S. government has been a major sponsor of our
exchanges with Russia, but many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have
also participated, some with and others without financial support from our
government.
Among them are the American Bar Association, American Council of
Young Political Leaders, League of Women Voters, National Governors
Association, U.S. Conference of Mayors, YMCA, our major art museums,
regional theaters, and many American universities, colleges, sports
associations, and impresarios.
I recognize that Russia and America are different, especially with
regard to what we call "the private sector." But Russia has benefitted
immensely from the rise in the price of oil and gas, and surely some
Russian NGOs have the financial means to sponsor exchanges that are in
Russia's, as well as America's, interest, and whose benefits to both will
be long lasting.
Russia and America are important to each other, and they should be
seeking ways to continue the exchanges that have served them so well in the
past.





















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[1] Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).